Tag Archives: SQLSaturday

Back in 2013 I attended my first PASS Summit. I was a first timer and Bill Fellows was my “big brother.” I had no clue what I was getting myself into. This is my story on how I became a speaker.

At my first summit, thanks to Bill, I was meeting people just about from the moment I got there. Bill knew lots of people. He’s tall and bald and hard to miss. And wears shorts. Everywhere. Regardless of temperature.

Where was I…oh yeah…speaking. While at summit that year I met and talked to many people. A few of them asked me “Have you ever thought about speaking?” I politely replied that I hadn’t, but I really wanted to ask them if they had forgotten their medication that day, or if they needed to be examined by a professional. Me – a speaker. LOLOLOLOLOLOL! Bless their hearts!

But then I thought about it. Why not speak? What would I talk about? What was something cool that I had done that people would want to know about? Could I do this? I showed people how to properly gift wrap a present in speech class (oh yes I did…and there is a right way…and you’re probably doing it wrong) – could I teach them something that would actually have some career benefit?

Yes. Yes I could.

I started to think about what I could talk about. I submitted a session to a SQL Saturday event later in 2013…and I was not selected. I didn’t know it at the time but I had picked a topic that was rather niche and would not have a real following. I found this out when I went to the event (yes, I still went…I was going to this one regardless) and talked to the organizers. This also allowed them to know who I was, so when I submitted again, they would be able to put a face with the name.

The following year I submitted a panel to a different SQL Saturday…and they picked it! This allowed me to get my feet wet while having some other more seasoned speakers there to help drive the conversation. In the weeks leading up to the event, we met and ironed out the details of what we would talk about. During those meetings I learned a lot from them, and they helped make that first session for me a success.

As a speaker, there are good days…and not good days.

A few months later I did my first solo session – and it did not go well. This was a tough pill to swallow. What happened? Simply put, my session didn’t reflect my abstract. I was disappointed in myself. It takes a few days for me to get over things like this, but since this was my first solo attempt, it really made me question whether or not I wanted to do this. Could I be good at this? I went home and re-wrote the session. Then looked at it and re-wrote it again. The next time I gave this session it went much better, and my feedback reflected it.

I love things that challenge me. Speaking does this, and does it in ways I would have never imagined. It takes me out of my comfort zone. No matter where I am for the foreseeable future, I will be speaking.

Speaking has taken my love of learning new things to the next level. Not only am I learning for the sake of a problem or making a business case for something, but now I am learning with a goal or being able to facilitate the learning of others. When I refine my skills, my session material gets better too.

My passions have found an outlet with speaking. It’s thrilling and sometimes frustrating. When you are speaking you never know what’s going to happen. Sometimes you have a lot of questions from the audience. Other times you have none. Sometimes you don’t know the answer. As much as you practice, it doesn’t change the fact that as many times as you give a certain session, no two of those are alike because no two audiences are alike. The one thing that is consistent is that the more times I am able to speak, the more people I am able to reach and help improve their SQL Server skill sets or adopt a new skill set with PowerShell. I don’t know where speaking is going to take me, but for now, I’m down for the ride to find out.

If you are interested in speaking, and would like to find out more, here are a few blog posts I found on this subject.

Next week I am returning to Orlando not only to visit the mouse at his house, but also to speak at SQL Saturday Orlando! Last year was my first time there and I had a great time. This also happened after the event was pushed back to November 2016 because of Hurricane Matthew.

This year I will talking about deadlocking and blocking – something that is an issue for so many DBAs. Whether this issue is indexes or bad code…or you have been trying in use indexes to cover up bad code, blocks and deadlocks can happen in even the best environments under the right circumstances. If you are going to be at SQL Saturday Orlando come to my session where we will talk about detecting and preventing these arch enemies of the DBA!

This Saturday will mark the fourth year that I will be speaking at SQL Saturday Baton Rouge at LSU. Out of all the SQL Saturday events I have participated in since 2014, Baton Rouge is one of the few that I have been to every year since. Houston is another one…and actually, these may be the only ones only because they have had an event every year.

Not only am I speaking on Automation with PowerShell and Deadlocks and Blocking, but I am also participating in a panel discussion on Careers in IT. I’m excited to be invited along with some of the other speakers to be a part of this. Looking back on my own school days, I knew I would have a career in IT, but little did I know I would detour from a path in development to the world of SQL Server, and becoming a DBA.

How do they make this happen? Work. Lots of hard work. After helping with SQL Saturday Dallas 2015, joining the NTSSUG board in 2016, and then having an organizing role in 2016, I found out how much goes into the planning of these events. If you have attended a SQL Saturday or you are going to in the future, be sure to say “THANK YOU!” to all the organizers and sponsors. If you want to get more involved in the SQL Server community, SQL Saturday is a great way to do that – just show up at the event, find an organizer and tell them that the SQL Kitten sent you to be their humble servant volunteer for the day…or you could just say you want to volunteer and leave out the other stuff because it might make it weird.

This weekend I will be speaking at SQL Saturday New York City. My last time here was two years ago for the last SQL Saturday here and I had a great time. If you are in the area come on out for some awesome speakers and a great day of learning!

Since I have not blogged in a while, and I saw it was T-SQL Tuesday, I thought I would participate in this FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER! This month SQLBalls asks us if our SQL Servers are on the naughty or nice list. Since I have recently transitioned to a new role, I am still getting familiar with the servers and the environments I am working with. The servers of my past are but a memory, but a fresh one. I cannot even begin to think of all the different “naughty” things that were done on those servers, and how some days it felt like a losing battle. How can you fight a security or code change when you have been over ridden by management, only to have that change come back and bite you weeks or months later? The “I told you so” you might feel like popping off will fall on deaf ears and you will just be stuck fixing the problem…until it gets to be too much and you decide it is time for action.

I have done this before. The day had been a long one and I thought I was finally going home when I got drug into a call on a data issue – something was changed that shouldn’t have been. When and by whom? I didn’t know or have any way of finding this information (days later when I tried to get a backup that was several months old to validate this data from when it was deployed; there was no backup – all all – but that is a completely different issue for another time). I had my suspicions but no proof. Could have been a naughty developer elf logging in with an elevated SQL account they knew the password for. Changing the password? “Out of the question” they say. It is everywhere.

If this were the only event that had happened THAT DAY. It wasn’t. This one was production (hence the conference call). The others (yes, more than one) were pre-production. Messes that had to be cleaned up because the developer elves thought they knew better than the DBA and that they could do it on their own. This production issue was the last straw. Elves were running a muck and had to be reigned in, and they weren’t going to like it.

All the elevated permissions in the pre-production servers – gone. I didn’t care if it was a DEV server. Am I the meanest DBA in the world? So says some. Scrooge? Well, if you are into name calling and want to go there, then ok, but I get to call you names too. In this case I did not care – I was fixing things that were only broken because someone abused a privilege. It should also be said that there was some relation in the names off all the tables involved with all the issues that occurred on this day.

If I had to wag my finger and any naughty part of the SQL Server instances it would have to be at security…and I am partially to blame. It can be difficult to keep up with all the changes that happen across a large environment when it comes to assigning permissions, and if you have more than one DBA, the situation is compounded by the fact that you might not always know what the other is doing and vice versa. They might grant something that you would otherwise veto for cause. You might take care of a permissions issue one way when they would handle it differently.

While I worked on some Powershell code to pull back users from specific AD groups and incorporate alerts for some of those groups, sadly the bandwidth was not there to fully roll this out. I did however create some triggers that would send email alerts when a change was made at the server and database levels, and I made them nameless and encrypted.

SET@mailbody=&#039;The following change has been made to the &#039;+@database+&#039; database on &#039;+@servername+&#039;:&#039;+CHAR(13)+CHAR(10)

+&#039;Change Made By: &#039;+@adding_user+CHAR(13)+CHAR(10)

+&#039;Event Type: &#039;+@event_type+CHAR(13)+CHAR(10)

+&#039;Server Name: &#039;+@servername+CHAR(13)+CHAR(10)

+&#039;Database Name: &#039;+@database+CHAR(13)+CHAR(10)

+&#039;Date/Time: &#039;+@datetime+CHAR(13)+CHAR(10)

+&#039;SQL Statement: &#039;+@command+CHAR(13)+CHAR(10)

EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail

@profile_name=&#039;DBMailProfile&#039;,

@recipients=&#039;alert@yourcompany.com&#039;,

@body=@mailbody,

@subject=@mailsubject;

END

The lack of a name for each of these is intentional, as is the encryption. The last thing I wanted was someone seeing these ans what they were doing, and if they had permissions to do so, disabling or dropping them to avoid having their nefarious behavior tracked. Even better would have been to put additional triggers in place to prevent the dropping of these no matter what, but I decided not to go there.

Note there is nothing there for the name for each of these – this is courtesy of the devious mind of Rob Volk. He might have too much time on his hands but this is pretty darn crafty. What you name these triggers is up to you but you have to MAKE NOTE OF WHAT THE NAME ARE!!! When I did these they were a combination of a few tabs and spaces – like “space space space tab tab” but with those actual characters. The result looks like this:

It should go without saying use this code at your own risk and always thoroughly vet and test anything before applying it to a production environment.

If this helps further cement my meanest DBA creds then I guess I am doing it right. Sometimes the elves developers can get out of hand and it is up to Santa the DBA to make sure they know they are being watched.

I have now officially submitted to SQL PASS Summit 2015. Five sessions. All me (well, and a few others on the panel I submitted). The hard part is over…but how did this all happen?

My story starts back in the year 2013. My first time to attend a SQL PASS Summit. It was in Charlotte, NC. I didn’t know these were normally in Seattle. It didn’t really seem to matter too much either. I was a first timer. And they labeled me as such.

I didn’t mind. I knew I was a newb. I embraced it. I signed up for and watched the webinar for first timers put on by Denny Cherry. I also got a first timer buddy (aka Someone I can follow around like a puppy until I am comfortable enough and have found other suitable, like minded, people that will welcome me and allow me to accompany them to places that sell beer).

I met so many new people while at Summit that year and out of all the conferences I had been to in the past, this was by far the best experience I had ever had. One this that happened numerous times when talking to people was hearing the words “Have you thought about presenting?” I’m all “Wow…these people are nice…and encouraging…wait…presenting? Say what?”

Did they need fresh meat? A new crop of willing yet unsuspecting folks to throw their hat in the ring, to hopefully be selected, and dive head first off that cliff into something that might become an obsession that would challenge them in ways they had never thought of before? Maybe. Maybe they did. Maybe it was a little cultish. Well, pass the kool-aid.

I came home and gave it some thought. I really wanted to do this but did not know where to start. I felt like I had stuff to say. Stories to tell. Experiences to share. But where to start? I decided I would do a panel. I rounded up some experienced speakers for a particular SQL Saturday, created my session and submitted it. That was the easy part. I then decided we would have weekly internet video chats so that everyone could get acquainted, and I could get their take on how they saw the panel going. They were also able to provide me much needed guidance with my slide deck (something else I had never done before) and how the session needed structure. I took all this in and did my slides accordingly.

The time finally came for the SQL Saturday event and my panel session. I made the trip out there and met up with everyone. I attended my very first speaker dinner. I could not believe I was there and in the same room with some of the brightest and well known minds in the SQL community. This was it – my first taste of what would consume that entire year.

The panel went well. My fellow panelists and other patted me on the back for a job well done. Feedback was good. I was elated. I was hooked. I thought I was ready to handle what was up next – my first solo session. Just me and my slides. Another SQL Saturday. Another city.

For those that attended my webinar last week with Pragmatic Works I have uploaded the code…finally. For what it is worth, the weekend was busy and I was working on my SQL PASS Summit submissions. Then, just as I was getting this together on Monday night, I was not feeling right and realized I was making mistakes and that is no good. Tried to go to work on Tuesday but even they knew something was wrong with me. Went home and found out later my nephew was also sick. No need for any further details. Just trying to get better. Thanks for your patience. 🙂

The lovely people at Pragmatic Works sent me some of your questions from the webinar. Without further adieu…

Do you have a suggestion for BEGINNERS learning books to get a basic understanding of PS??

Great question! While I have a TON of books on all kinds of things (SQL Server, C#, web dev stuff, etc.) I do not have a single book on Powershell. How did I accomplish all this then? Simple – using this pesky thing we call the internet. I have also attended some great Powershell sessions at SQL Saturday events.

Did they leave any beer bottles?

The roofers? Thankfully no.

Do not criticize the king of soda pop, Dr. Pepper!

Preach it!

When will VBScript stop functioning for SQL Server or Windows Server. As in will there be a total switch?

VBScript? Hmmmm…great question. No clue. This might be a Microsoft cockroach. Like replication.

why we need a PS-Drive – why we can just use an arraay directly?

You mean passing in the server name from the array to the Invoke-SqlCmd? Yeah, you could do that. That’s just not how I wrote this. 🙂

what is her email again?

Leave a comment here if you would like to email me and I will get back to you.

does the ( $servers | Measure-Object).count syntax do?

That counts the number of items in the array.

What is the purpose of the New-PSDrive?

New-PSDrive is a method of connecting to a SQL Server instance. Another method would be to declare a connection with SMO (Server Management Objects).

Does it work on windows 2003 as well?

I have not tested this against Windows Server 2003.

so, ps-drive is the equivalent of object explorer in SSMS?

Well, kinda. Maybe. More the equivalent of browsing a drive in a cmd.exe window.

what city in Austin?

Ummmm….Austin is a city.

What permission you require on AD for this excercise

To make the AD changes, I have no clue. Not my area and I also intentionally created the Azure VM so I could make all the changes I needed to without worrying about a silly thing like permissions. As far as reading from AD (which is the main Powershell script for this part) I am not sure about this either but I am assuming you need some level of read permissions (which is all that script is doing).

There are some things where I may tend to run something, and if anyone says anything, ask forgiveness later. Security is pretty tight where I am – I have gotten dinged on xp_cmdshell but so far nothing on reading from AD. If for some reason you can’t run anything against AD, I would find the person over that and find out why, and let them know what you are trying to do.

Thanks again to everyone who attended. If you have any other questions leave a comment. 🙂

Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions at SQL Satruday #324 in Baton Rouge. This was really a awesome event – thanks also to all the people that helped put it on and all the sponsors who helped make it happen.

I had a great time presenting and I think my demos went ok (for the first time ever doing demos). I also really appreciate the feedback since I want to keep on presenting. If you were in one of the sessions and have any further comments or questions feel free to leave a comment here and I will get back to you.

Also, I have gotten the scripts posted here and the download appears to be working now. Let me know if you have any questions about those. Enter the password below to access and download the scripts from Beginning Automation with Powershell.

The last time I was in southern Louisiana I was barely in my 20’s and on a family vacation. I found that my normal routine for straightening my natural curls was no match for the level of humidity in New Orleans. This memory prompted me to check the weather for this weekend – yeah…this could get interesting.